Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

Tuesday mid-day round-up and Open Thread

Fasten your seat belts, because it’s going to be a wild ride with more links than any single post should possibly have.

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Stunning: A California judge ruled today that teacher tenure is unconstitutional, insofar as its practical effect is to deprive students of their right to a quality education. I was taught by tenured teachers, many of whom were just counting the years until retirement, so I can attest to the fact that the judge is right. Here’s the opinion, if you’re interested.

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Great moments in personal responsibility:

Harry Truman: “The buck stops here.”

Bart Simpson: “I didn’t do it.”

Barack Obama: “Yeah, I know that I spiked the football in the Rose Garden about what I said was my decision to trade a deserter for five of the worst terrorists in a war still being fought against us. But now that I know you, the public, think that was a bad decision, it’s time for me to come clean: It’s Chuck Hagel’s fault.”

Obama is so low, he doesn’t even achieve the standards of the most dishonest, weasel-like, school-yard bully.

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If you were willing to give Bowe Bergdahl the benefit of the doubt, would it matter to you to learn that contemporaneous communications available through Wikileaks show that those troops who are speaking out are correct when they say the word on the street in 2009 was that Bergdahl was (a) a deserter and (b) looking for the Taliban?

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The New York Times is done with these pesky facts. It’s come up with the ultimate excuse: Serving in the military is the cause of mental illness. Troops need to be kept locked up because, if they don’t desert, there’s something wrong with them. They imply that Bergdahl, who deserted, was the sane guy; and those who stayed behind to defend our country cannot be trusted. It’s the new Catch-22 for Obama’s America.

Thankfully, despite DemProg purges and despite their being high up in the chain of command at an innately weak, palsied, government bureaucracy, at least some generals still exist who find this attitude distasteful and think that actual military service (not enlisting and then running away, but actually serving) is honorable and praiseworthy. Ralph Peters has some words on the subject.

Most DemProgs claim to support the troops . . . and then stab them in the back. One L.A. Times columnist is foregoing that hypocrisy. In her considered opinion, all troops, especially Marines, are potential peacetime killers, so she is profoundly grateful that the Mexican government so fit to lock up former Marine Andrew Tahmooressi. I have no words. I’ll leave you to come up with some.

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Meanwhile, evidence continues to turn up demonstrating that Bergdahl Sr. either had Stockholm Syndrome by association, or went crazy when his son vanished, or is the type of guy who goes a long way to explaining why his son was out looking for the Taliban — and not to kill them either.

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If the drive-by media bothered to update their story, this is what they’d have to say: “Yeah, about that melting glacier in the West Antarctic, the one we said was caused by anthropogenic global warming, a report that sparked a blind panic among the true believers. You can just forget about it for now. We kind of, you know, didn’t notice the volcano under the ice sheet. Our bad.

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Navel-gazing has always been the Left’s purview. The University of California system (the one that sparked outrage amongst students when it raised tuition), just wasted a million dollars on consultants, in-house analysis, employee time, etc., to find out if students and faculty are satisfied with the system. Of the minuscule number who wasted time participating in the study, most are happy, which is pretty good for a vast institution. But in dictator-land, everyone must be happy (as happiness is defined by the dictator), or else! So UC is contemplating spending more money to achieve happiness perfection.

Americans are being urged to submit to “dictatorial” government because democracy is incapable of controlling the weather. “In college classes, climate change is taught as a textbook example of where democracy fails,” Graves asserts in the very first sentence of her [Lucia Graves'] column.

Well, that settles it. America might have been a noble experiment, but science has proven it a failure.

Graves is not alone. Laer Pearce sent me a link to a web page that has dozens of quotations from well-placed individuals in the environmental movement demanding a mass human die-off to save the planet. It makes for horrifying reading. Even the Nazis weren’t this open about their genocidal plans.

Obama’s “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH) plan should terrify everyone who doesn’t want to live in a government designed urban hub. And don’t think you’re safe because you’re in the suburbs. They’re target Number One for communities that will henceforth be made up of scientifically determined dwelling sizes and styles, all of which will be peopled by a government-mandated mix of races. Getting the economic mix correct, though, won’t be a problem. We’ll all be poor, except for the DemProg elites, who will continue to live in their obscene, un-green mansions.

I know precisely what the plans make me think of. If you’ve ever read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, you remember that a damaged planet, controlled entirely by evil, was represented by a perfectly planned neighborhood, with all people sharing the same dwellings and behaviors . . . or else.

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Liberalism killed the Super Hero. The Super Hero used to be a glowing antifascist; now he’s a conflicted character wandering aimlessly between cultural relativism, anti-American feeling, and fascist behaviors (for people’s own good, of course).

Here it must he remarked that a belief in a literal six-day creation harms no one. Who cares. So what. But the belief, popular with many prominent liberals like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that vaccines cause autism and other diseases despite piles of “settled science” to the contrary, has real consequences when people act on it—which too many gullible parents have.

This reminds me of the rules governing writing wills. People are allowed to be crazy when they write their will, provided that they are compos mentis as to the nature of their estate and their proposed heirs. Just because you believe in Martians doesn’t mean you’re incapable of properly distributing your property. However, if you think that you own the White House, and want to bequeath it to the Muslim Brotherhood . . . well, that’s a problem.

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One of the things the Founders feared terribly was a standing domestic military, one charged, not with fighting against external enemies but, instead, with targeting the American people. This chart would make them very, very sad:

The WaPo reports facts showing that the VA Scandal — which Obama long ago promised to solve — is much worse than any one first realized. Honestly, even if Obama doesn’t really hate the military, he sure acts as if he does.

If it bleeds, it leads. That’s long been the rule in the news. In our lifetime, the notion of blood got modified to include killer pesticides, killer bees, killer cars, killer gangs, killer drugs, killer GMOs, etc. The latest killer is gender dysphobia. Apparently American children suddenly hate their birth sex. If this trend continues, I know who our new American role model should be:

Do I have to say anything about how ludicrous it is that Hillary’s crying poor? If I had to recommend a single article pointing that out, I’d go for Charles C.W. Cooke’s article about her entitlement problem.

You kind of have to admire Hillary, though. She’s got balls. Without a blush, she’s offering the totally incoherent argument (complete with baseball metaphors) that her performance before, during, and after Benghazi somehow proves that she has the leadership skills America needs.

Balls, yes. Smart friends? Welllll, maybe. One of them valiantly said, “yes,” Hill and Bill were broke when they left the White House, never mind the $8 million book deal signed before they’d even packed up, the endless stream of government benefits, and the obvious possibility of lucrative speaking deals. But, adds the oh-so-helpful friend, they’re kind of disconnected from ordinary middle class economics now.

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Among the many, many re-vamped pieces of history in Hillary’s new fiction book (which masquerades as an “autobiography,” which is a nice marketing touch) is her claim to be a friend to Israel; or, at least, more of a friend than Obama. In fact, she was Obama’s willing executioner.

Remember that time you got food poisoning after eating at that cute, hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant. Well, we now know why that it happened. It’s because racism. And no, I’m not kidding. You were puking your guts out and suffering from liquid bowels because you’re a hater.

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The reality at America’s colleges: DemProg fantasies about health, science, food, Jews, Muslims are all acceptable. Traditional religious beliefs, however, must be purged.

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Superheroes? Good thing I don’t watch Hollywood or Western entertainment brainwashing.

The rest of the world actually has heroes in their media. In that case, fiction is at least better than the truth of US Hollywood.

The Dems had a good reason to abandon defense commitments to the Republic of Vietnam. One, they needed that funding for vote buying back home.

So why did Hussein redirect forces from Iraq, not to Afghanistan, but back to America and played shuffle board? It’s so they can lose military hardware and transfer it to the US, so that the DHS can distribute them to the police unions, a Leftist member. And then the police unions will use them to…

http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com Ymarsakar

When the Republic falls, it is to astounding applause from the Senate.

Look at that, Reid’s applauding right now.

Mike Devx

The big news of today came late: Eric Cantor has suffered the biggest upset defeat, in his Republican primary, that I can recall in my lifetime.

The best anyone expected is that the vote might be CLOSE. Nope. His opponent not only made a good show, but he won. Did he win a squeaker? Nope. He won by about 55% – 45%, against a sitting incumbent. That is a landslide of shocking proportions.

This is unheard of. This is an earthquake that is off the top of the Richter scale. For this to happen to an incumbent is a cataclysm on the scale of Armageddon, politically.

It will be interesting to read the tea leaves over the coming days. There will be bluster and howling and spin, spin, spin. It doesn’t appear to be about ObamaCare; if it is about a single issue, that would be illegal immigration. But is this broader than a single issue? Is it about establishment Republicans’ weak-kneed, no-spine approach to the Obama Administration, their coddling and appeasement, their attempts to keep power for no other purpose than power itself, their refusal to define and stand on any conservative principles? A belief that they have abandoned us? A belief that they seek compromise with Democrats, but seek the destruction of actual conservatives?

Pop your popcorn, and settle in. It’s going to be quite a show.

http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com Ymarsakar

Eric Cantor’s staff seemed to be making comments about stomping Tea Party and Sarah Palin in the face, given they raised 3 million to the college professor’s 200k.

I enjoyed that one, if only for that.

SADIE

What I found most interesting, other than the obvious political WTF moment, was that Cantor raised $5.5 million and spent $5 million on the primary. Dave Brat raised just over $200,000 and spent just over $100,000 for the win. Brat, as you probably know by now is a professor of economics.
Unseating the minority leader – Priceless!

Less salacious, it was also the same title used by Cyrus Vance in his memoir.

Charles Martel

I suspect that The New York Times‘s slander against men in uniform is part of a conscious strategy to persuade its readers that the federal government’s supplying of military-style weapons to local police departments is a prudent thing to do. The Times itself ran an article two days ago showing the massive amounts of surplus military matériel that are being funneled to cops, surprisingly much of it to states like Oklahoma where anti-fed sentiment is strong.

The Times is laying the groundwork for a clampdown on the hordes of imaginary military-veteran psychos out there, all dedicated to the imposition of Christianist, rightest, homophobist horrors on America. In a way, it’s a goad. The Establishment is engaged in a big, provocative tease designed to inflame all the vets out there who are watching this country slide into the crapper. One provocation and a few crazed veterans too many will justify the militarization of America’s cops and the imposition of martial law in selected areas.

At first it will be a test to see what resistance unfolds there and elsewhere, and then as an excuse to extend martial law to entire states or regions. Obama has always operated by the death of a thousand cuts—one small crime here, one almost big lie there. So, imposing martial law will start out on a limited scale, first, as a response to a dastardly outbreak of lawlessness in State X, and then later nationwide as a wise precautionary tactic to preserve law and order.

The problem with all this thinking is that the people thinking it are the same people who can’t run anything right—the VA, foreign affairs, IRS, etc. They can buy as many hollow-point rounds they’d like, and supply as many Podunk police departments and arrogant, incompetent SWAT teams as they’d like, but very few of those recipients are trained in the type of warfare that most supposedly crazy time-bomb vets have been. Macho men running around in SWAT team uniforms descending on sleeping grannies are not really going to be a match for men trained in improvisational tactics.

I checked out the argument the linked article made. And the math didn’t make sense to me. If whites are 37% of the population, and non-whites are 45% of the mass murderers, wouldn’t that mean that 55% of the mass murders are which–which is disproportionately higher than their population? It was only when the author looked at more recent mass murders that he came up with the percentage of Asian mass murderers being higher than their percentage in the population.

What am I missing?

GingerB

I always perk up when you mention a book I’ve loved, (Wrinkle in Time) so I thought I’d mention another book by a children’s author that also has parallels to life in the U.S. I think The Giver by Lois Lowry is one of the most thought-provoking books I read during my time as a librarian. Even though its fiction, I found it chilling- but well worth the time.

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